What is happening around here

Well, what is the most fun right now continues to be our bats. We have four hummingbird feeders hanging along the front of our porch which we have freshly topped up with sugar water. About 7:00 in the evening it is completely dark, and we turn on the porch light, a weak light but strong enough to illuminate the activity. Suddenly the bats are coming in waves, and when we go outside these sturdy little creatures seem like they are barely missing our heads. We try to estimate how many we have, but they are coming so fast, appearing out of and disappearing into the darkness, it is impossible, but we think at times we have seen up to ten at once.

 

 

 

 These are Mexican Long-tongued Bats visiting us at this time of year from farther south. They are not the bats that use echo-locating to catch insects in flight; these are nectar-drinking bats, designed for drinking from flowering cacti, but if hummingbird-lovers want to set out sweets for them that's okay with them too. It's true many people are exasperated when they get up in the morning and find all their hummingbird feeders have been robbed and are totally empty, but we try to re-educate those people to show them how much fun the robbers themselves can be. We and our guests often sit out on the porch on a cool evening to watch them for an hour or so. And fair play, they do feed from flowers too. Here's a picture of one showing its long tongue, and notice its fur is yellow from pollen, from the flowers it has rubbed up against.

The second event here for the last few weeks, more on the exasperating side, less on the entertaining, is that this is  a "Snout year." Snouts (see Cheryl's photo) are small rather drab butterflies whose only distinguishing features are long extended palps (like snouts) that still would scarcely make them noticeable if it wasn't for their propensity to explode their population, often into millions in a small area. That is exactly what is happening right now, which is making people who drive above twenty miles an hour on narrow rural roads feel like mass murderers, the movement of the car stirring up a tide-line of corpses. If you walk by a bush which for some reason is attractive to them you can slap it and they will fly up in clouds. At its peak one day we looked up into an open stretch  of sky and it was filled with butterflies from top to bottom, all traveling in one direction. I had often read about snout years; this is the first I have witnessed.

 

 

The third event, and you have to live right for this one, you can sit at your breakfast nook table looking through the window to the porch where a very handsome young bobcat is standing about six or seven feet away, paying no attention to you.